Sunday, November 15, 2009

Today is Sunday and as Sunday is supposed to be a 'day of rest', that is exactly what we did. We were up at 7:30am to get ready for church as it started at 9am. We are only a 15 minute walk from the chapel and so we left at about 8:35am so that we could be there with 10 minutes to spare. When we were seated and there was about five minutes left until the meeting was going to start, one of the counsellors got up and asked for reverence. As soon as he said that, you could have heard a pin drop and it was like that until the meeting started. Usually, in most wards we have been in, there would still have been a little chattering, but not here.

There were only two speakers today as the counsellor who was conducting the meeting asked his son (who had just received his graduation diploma from seminary) to bear his testimony. You should have seen the look of surprise on his face when his dad said he would be doing it before the first talk. :-) It was a typical youth testimony - short and mostly about being thankful he had gone through seminary and gratefulness for his seminary teacher. The first speaker, Sue Coates, is in the Relief Society presidency and she spoke about the Proclamation of the Family - about how important it is to remain close to your family. The second speaker, Brother Carr, spoke about his spiritual experiences over his life - he was baptized into the church, went away from it for a number of years, and then became active again after one of his sons became ill.

Sunday School was taught by Trudy Yuginovich - the lesson was about doing your family history. She talked about how it's up to us to use the resources/tools that the church provides to start/continue/complete your genealogy. It's something that I have been thinking about doing for ages and now that I am planning on supply teaching instead of full-time teaching, I am thinking that this will be the perfect time to input all the information I do have into the church program and then continue on with it. In fact, my dad's cousin, John Leggo, lives in Sydney and my mom has asked me to get what I can from him regarding my dad's side of the family. I have spoken to John and we are going to meet up in the week before we head back to Canada this time so that I can get a copy of what he has.

Relief Society was taught by Nerida Sweeney - she taught a lesson about Joseph Smith and the feelings he had as he taught the Saints the things they needed to know. She is a good teacher (just like Rosalea was last week) and it's great to be in those kinds of lessons. Joseph Smith is one of my heroes not only because of what he did in restoring the gospel to the earth, but also because he was persecuted so much and yet he kept going in the face of adversity. One thing I learned in this week's lesson about him was that he loved the children and they loved him. He seemed to treat them with respect and showed them that he cared about them.

Chris and Chris gave us a ride home, although we would have walked home if they had not offered. It was another beautiful day today (or was it another perfect day today? :-) Mike says he can't remember from one day to the next if it's a beautiful day or a perfect day that day (the motto here in Queensland is 'Beautiful one day, Perfect the next'. :-) The rest of today we have just been hanging around our place playing cards, making shopping lists, and planning what we are going to be doing tomorrow since Julianne is loaning us her car again. I love Sundays!!! :-)